Marriage vs Single-Parenting

As to Marriage vs Single-Parenting, it seems that Brittany, who sent the comments shown farther down, has very strong opinions on the merits of marriage or lack thereof. She sent a follow-up comment after I wrote back to her, and she may have more to say, for that reason I began two new categories, so that she will have a place to post her comments.

Brittany began by commenting on a few different subjects covered at the website of Fathers for Life, without pointing to specific quotes on particular web pages that her comments pertained to. Such comments cannot be answered properly, but it was her first time she wrote to F4L, and she probably did not know any better. Here is what she wrote:

I agree with most of what you are saying but women have made some gains since the 1960’s. If a woman wants to be a scientist or a doctor it is much easier for her to do so. Not evrything since the last 50 years have ven been bad. I do agree with you about abortion but not really about birth control. Yes abstinence is ideal and it is the best but will teens stop having sex? Things were not as squeaky clean in the old days as people think. There was more premarital sex than people admitted to. A lot of people just got married afterwards especially if a female was pregnant.

American Sexual Behavior You should see the information around page 25. Women who were unwed mothers were shunned and judged even if they had sex with only one guy or even one time. Please look at The Girls Who Went Away on Google Books. I recommend trying to find this book at the library. The double standard was huge. Boys were not condemned if they had sex or got somebody pregnant. My grandmother was one of the girls who had to get married so the only difference between her and those girls was that my grandmother had a wedding.

I responded to Brittany:

Hello Brittany,

Surely you would like others to read what you have to say. So, rather than telling your thoughts just to me, in private and hidden from public view, why don’t you post your comments at Dads & Things, the blog affiliated with our website?

In that fashion you can pick a specific topic of interest, select a given posting, and comment on it.

That will make it easier to respond to you, as long as you make it possible to respond by sticking to specific topics of interest, rather than to express generalities. Do not try to read all of the website of Fathers for Life; it is far too large for that. Rather, when you respond to something, quote what got your attention and show the URL at which you found it.

Still, to comment on your observation regarding your grandmother, as in “…so the only difference between her and those girls was that my grandmother had a wedding,” you overlook or downplay important aspects.

Your perception is quite incorrect, as to what you imply. The absence of an important difference is not what you think it is. Your grandmother made sure to marry the man who had helped her to conceive, whereby she was then also able to provide a stable home for herself, that child and others that were perhaps to follow, and for the father of those children, for whom all he was without a doubt the designated provider.

The important difference between that and having children out of wedlock is that she committed herself to marital fidelity, while her contemporaries were able to continue the pursuit of promiscuity (if they so wanted) and to let their children be raised as full- or semi-orphans, fatherless and often in squalor, as Father State was then not quite as ready and eager to jump into the breach left by expunged fathers.

The most important difference of all was that your grandmother was not a slut.

Brittany, if you wish to respond to that, it will have to be done at Dads & Things.

–Walter

The PDF file Brittany referred contains a very large report. Even though Brittany made a vague reference to one general location in the report (“You should see the information around page 25.”), that does not permit to make specific comments, as that could mean, for example, everything contained on pages 24 to 26 or perhaps in an even larger portion of the report.

Furthermore, she did not identify whether the report had ever been published in the peer-reviewed literature, not even whether it had ever been published in any professional journal at all.

Just in quickly browsing through the report I found a few statements that make me wonder how objective the whole report is. For instance, as reported under “Premarital and Adolescent Sexual Activity” (p. 3), how can it be that men more likely than women have premarital intercourse. Whom do those men have sexual intercourse with, married women, men, animals? They surely cannot, according to the report, have sexual intercourse with women who have premarital intercourse, because those women are claimed to have premarital intercourse far less frequently than men do.

What the report states on that page is a statistical impossibility. Given that only around 2 percent of men engage at some time in same-sex intercourse, it follows that the vast majority of premarital intercourse involves men and women to equal proportions. It follows that either men are braggarts about their promiscuity and lie about their feats of sexual conquests, or women lie about being chaste. It so happens that some research has been done on that. The experiments run during those studies showed that women are more likely to lie about being chaste than men are likely to lie about their sexual conquests.

The study results showed a more reasonable conclusion, namely that men and women engage in sexual intercourse equally often. That makes sense, whereas the report cited by Brittany appears to be very questionable in that respect. (See: Adultery is not abuse, and women don’t lie?)

The reason for the discrepancy in the numbers of sexual partners by either sex stems from the eagerness with which researchers who produce reports such as “American Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-Demographic Differences, and Risk Behavior”, by Tom W. Smith et al. swallow assertions by female study subjects without valid scientific substantiation.

Brittany had one more thing to say and did not quite know where to post it. Here it is:

I know in this day in age there are women who want to be single mothers but sometimes the man leaves. In the case of many women like my grandma who had a shotgun wedding the man could have easily left. Some women were just unlucky.

Well, Brittany, bad luck just runs both ways. That is because of the laws of averages. Probabilities work against both sexes, and women are not more more stupid than men are.

Nevertheless, women have a way to influence their “luck”. Divorces are filed in about two out of three cases by women. Once children are present, they provide additional incentives for women to file for divorce, which they then do in three out of four cases, and they “win” child custody in most cases.

That is not due to luck. It is due to biased court systems. Those hardly ever fail to let women walk away with kids, car, cash and castle, leaving the man holding the empty bag and having the obligation to pay for the lifestyle the woman has become accustomed to during the marriage from which she removed the inconvenience of her husband and father of “her” children with the help of the courts.

10 Responses to Marriage vs Single-Parenting

…By the way I dont consider having sex with a girlfriend or boyfriend promiscuous. If you have numerous sex partners then you are promiscuous….

The average number of sexual partners is more than one, around 13, and even in the age group 18 to 25 years it is already quite high, about four. That makes your reference to having only one sexual partner a bit quaint, but by your definition of what is not promiscuous, one would then have to conclude that the vast majority of people is in fact promiscuous.

The following is from one of the studies I had pointed out to you.

Fisher and Alexander surveyed over 200 unmarried, heterosexual college students aged 18 to 25.

One group filled in questionnaires having been told the researcher might view their responses. A second group filled in the survey completely anonymously, alone in a room.

A third group had electrodes placed on their hand, forearms and neck and were told they were being attached to a polygraph or lie detector machine – although there was in fact no working machine.

Women who thought their responses might be read said they had had an average of 2.6 sexual partners, compared with 3.4 partners for those who thought their answers were anonymous. But those who thought they would be caught out by the polygraph reported an average of 4.4 partners.

In contrast, men’s answers did not vary significantly. Those attached to the lie-detector reported an average of 4.0 partners compared with 3.7 for men who thought their answers would be read….(Full Story)

Some writers who comment on the consequences of the “sexual liberation” identify that STDs are now rampant and endemic, especially amongst college students. Many of them blame sex education for that, that is, sex education provided to fairly young children. They argue that doing so conditions children to see premarital sex and promiscuity not only as normal but permissible. (

It’s a bit difficult to find good, solid middle-ground in all of that moral confusion, isn’t it? The only thing we know with certainty is that what we have right now is much more confusing and damaging than what we once had. However, we did our best to dismantle that which gave us security and stability, in exchange for a false promise that things would then become much better.

Thank you sir. Yeah I should have been clearer the first time but I can be a little ditzy. By the way I don’t consider having sex with a girlfriend or boyfriend promicuous. If you have numerous sex partners then you are promiscuous. I guess my point was to not to go from one extreme to another. We are experiencing one extreme right now the hook up culture. People sleeping with whoever is available and mothers planning to become single mothers. In the 1950’s we had another extreme. Good girl makes mistake and she can’t get married. She is told by society she is a slut and her baby will not have a chance. Socirty needs to find a spot in the middle for this and everthing else.

The only way you can fully understand what I mean is to read on Google Books The Girls Who Went Away. Its one of the most powerful books you can read.

There is no possible way I can find the time to read that book right now. Books can make powerful impressions, but even though and because books are generally intended to do that, the premises of many books that impact the emotions are not necessarily correct, or they may not tell you all of the truth and present selected portions of the truth pertaining to a given issue in a biased fashion.

That is so with much that has been written about the baby-scoop era, as the Wikipedia entry for the Baby Scoop Era shows. For instance, in that, the claim about the “stolen generation” in Australia is a hoax. Government policy was quite reasonable and respected aboriginal rights. Moreover, in spite of all assertions to the contrary, the numbers of aboriginal children put up for adoption were quite small. The truth on that is on record.

For the best part of thirty years we have been conducting a vast experiment with the family, and now the results are in: the decline of the two-parent, married-couple family has resulted in poverty, ill-health, educational failure, unhappiness, anti-social behaviour, isolation and social exclusion for thousands of women, men and children.

About my comment about the Victorians and prostitution was an assumption .[Rest snipped because the comment violated blog rules. WHS]

I will state this just once: You correctly stated that your comment about the Victorians and prostitution was an assumption. The validity of an assumption will not be improved by making further unsubstantiated assumptions, guesses and assertions about it.

The blog rules for Dads & Things state that you must Use facts and logic in your comments. In case the meaning of that is not clear in your mind, it means that comments that are not based on facts and logic are unacceptable.

Furthermore, at this blog you will not be permitted to point to any location of information without stating which specific item of information at that location it is that you refer to and wish the reader to look up. In addition to that, you must also state sufficient details that will enable anyone to find with ease the exact location of a specific item of information you are using to illustrate or support your point of view.

You must abide by the rules of this blog, so that there is no danger that a discussion on any given subject turns into a spiderweb (quoted from one of your previous comments in this thread).

This will be my last try. If I can’t get it right this time I give up. I just looked at my original email and I did notice I didn’t mention sex ed or birth control. So you were correct about that. I was looking at your response to an email about sex ed. http://fathersforlife.org/health/sex-ed.htm Your response to the email is at the top. I responded with my email because I wanted to say something relevant about it. My point was that abstenence is the ideal and the best thing but will abstinence only education work? I am currantly reading about the baby scoop era and girls who were sent away to give up their babies in secret and suffering from emotional damage until they were reunited with their kids decades later. As explained in the book The Girls Who Went Away despite kids not knowing a lot about sex premarital activity still went up causing illegitimacy and the baby scoop era. Unless the unwed girl got married she was sent away while absolutely nothing happened to the males.

The only way you can fully understand what I mean is to read on Google Books The Girls Who Went Away. It’s one of the most powerful books you can read.

Brittany, I think that I mentioned to you once before (in one of my e-mails to you) that you need to check the rules for this blog. Do that. It will only take seconds. Make sure you understand what the rules state about trolling and piling on. Make sure you understand all of the rules.

You are trolling and piling on. Whether you will be permitted to continue commenting on this blog depends on how well you understand and adhere to the blog rules.

Now to your latest comment, at November 14, 2010 at 11:19 pm

Brittany, your first sentence stated “This has turned into a spider web.” Right, it has. You did the spinning by piling on.

You further said “I guess I should start at the beginning.” Right, that is a good idea, and we will. I will do it for you, as the beginning I had tried to construct out of the hodge-podge of your initial message was obviously not good enough.

Although in your comment at November 14, 2010 at 11:19 pm, following those important two introductory sentences, you immediately followed what was obviously an empty promise with a new conglomerate of concerns that had not yet been discussed in our exchange and therefore are not at the beginning but at the end of the discussion.

However, you followed that act by adding on an afterthought that should have been at the beginning of the whole thread, the specific subject area in which your specific concern is located.

You were good enough to identify, which you should have done in your very first message to me, that the scope of your concerns deals with the web page on sex education at F4L. It is good that out of the close to 1,500 web pages at F4L you identified the one of interest to you.

That is a step into the right direction. Now, if you please can be so good and identify which specific facts, comments, data or any other piece of information on that web page you disagree with or need further clarification on, take your time to identify them and do so.

I am certain that you know what a strawman is, so, please, do not introduce any more of them into any discussion threads here, or I may feel compelled to mention strawmen in the blog rules.

You have not yet been prohibited from posting comments on this blog, because your offences may have been inadvertent, but you are close to being barred. If you cannot understand why that is so, then perhaps this is not the place where you should make appearances.

This has turned into a spider web. I guess I should start at the beginning….[The rest of your comment is not snipped but embargoed. Additional observations regarding your concerns will be posted in short order. Stay tuned. –WHS]

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Seriously I was talking about sex education .I wasnt trying to advocate anything against marriage. I was just trying to show you even before sex ed premarital sex still happened and often it was only the girls who paid the price.

I see. I didnt think that we had misunderstood one another, because you did not mention sex-education at all until now. You were pretty clear about it all, I thought, by stating,

My grandmother was one of the girls who had to get married so the only difference between her and those girls [that is, the girls who had children out of wedlock WHS] was that my grandmother had a wedding.

Now that you brought up sex-education, does that then mean that your grandmother had no idea how babies were made, for which reason she had to have a wedding?

look at it this way. You were quite lucky that she was not educated enough to have an abortion instead. If that would have happened, you might not be around right now.

There is no need to apologize for anything. No offence was taken. Other than that, could you explain why you think that often it was only the girls who paid the price? After all, your grandfather had to pay a price, too. He who was the one whom your grandmother got married to.

However, were they not happy together? Did things not turn out well all around? It could have been worse, your grandmother could have been one of the girls who often paid the price. Instead, it seems to me, she and any other girls who had a short pregnancy after they got married got a pretty good deal by getting themselves a husband for life.

Please be more specific about your claim that Especially during the Victorian period prostitution was an issue, and specifically why you guess that maybe the men got most of their experience there. I would not want that to become another source of a misunderstanding.

You cant have it both ways. There cannot have been a lot of premarital sex and girls who often paid the price for that, in addition to there having been a lot of prostitution where men got their experience so that girls could remain chaste before marriage. Can you see the contradictions in all of that?

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Seriously I was talking about sex education and it turned into a conversation about everything mostly divorce. I wasn’t even trying to spread propoganda I was being honest. I just picked a source if it wasn’t accurate I apologize. If you think about the difference between male and female sex it can make sense. Especially during the Victorian period prostitution was an issue so maybe the men got most of their experience there. I wasn’t trying to advocate anything against marriage. I was just trying to show you even before sex ed premarital sex still happened and often it was only the girls who paid the price. If I offended you in anyway I apologize.

Some of those are for a 1998 version of the report that Brittany had cited.

I don’t know how much funding the US National Science Foundation provided to have the report produced, but the NSF most definitely did not get their money’s worth, even though most of the references to the report found by the search appear to be favourable.

To be sure that I would not overlook comments by individuals who use British and not the American version of English, I repeated the search with this character string:

“American Sexual Behaviour” “Tom W. Smith”

The search-return list for that produced only one additional entry.

Percentages of homosexuals and bisexuals in some major Western nations

Although that is a 1st draft, it is worth reading at least as much as the report by Tom W. Smith from which it quotes. For one thing, it alleviates the need for me to have to spend more time having to read what “American Sexual Behavior” reports, even though Graham Fitzpatrick put more faith into that report than I am willing to put into it.

The report by Tom W. Smith reports on figures that are largely and perhaps exclusively the result of opinion survey’s. That is not a surprise, as Tom W. Smith produced his report for, and in the capacity of an employee of, the National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago.

As indicated in the main posting in this thread, in relation to figures on premarital sexual relationships based on opinions, opinions are not reliable foundations for absolute and objective scientific truths.

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